Sunday, 21 July 2013

Planes, Trains and Automobiles - from Calci to Seville

We decided to save a couple of bucks and fly RyanAir to Spain.  For those of you who have never taken one of these "discount" airlines, we haven't even left Calci yet and it's already been quite the adventure.

We originally booked to fly from Pisa to Seville, but that flight was cancelled so now we're departing from Bologna.  The departure is at 6:30 AM so here is our itinerary:

This morning we have booked a taxi for 11 AM to take us to the train station.  I tried using the online booking but due to some deficiencies in the online booking system it does not actually accept online bookings.  So this morning I phoned and fortunately the dispatcher spoke English.

We are then taking a train from Pisa to Bologna.  We haven't actually bought the train tickets yet so are hoping we won't have too long of a wait at the station.  It's about a 2 hour train ride to Bologna.

We are staying overnight in Bologna and looking forward to trying some delicious Bolognese cuisine!

We then fly out of Bologna the next morning.  Due to bag restrictions on Ryan Air we have jammed 2 weeks worth of cloths (for 3 of us) into one 15 kg checked bag.  (The bag itself weighs about 4 kg empty).  Ryan Air sends me about 4 emails a day reminding us that the carry-on limit is strictly 1 bag, max 10 kg, including all purses, laptops, shopping, etc, and the charge is 60 Euro for oversize carry-on baggage.  There is also a charge if you don't pre-print your boarding card, if you want to reserve a seat, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Once we arrive in Seville we have a rental car for 2 weeks, we are spending the first night in Seville, and the next day drive to our beach rental in Zahara, between Gibraltar and Cadiz, Spain. The chances of every leg of this trip running smoothly without incident are "as close as you can get to zero without falling in".  So expect some interesting blog entries over the next few days!


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